Clorox ditches BlackBerry, 92 percent of employees replace it with iPhone
According to Computerworld, Clorox CIO Ralph Loura recently realized that the company's workers were no longer satisfied with their corporate-issued BlackBerry phones. Loura decided to ditch BlackBerry as a platform and gave 2000 employees three choices for replacements: an iPhone, a phone running Android or a phone running Windows Phone 7. A full 92 percent of employees chose an iPhone, 6 percent picked an Android phone, and a tiny 2 percent (40 employees out of 2000) chose Windows Phone 7 as their platform of choice.
Loura stated that the security concerns that have held back other companies' IT departments from embracing iOS weren't an issue for Clorox. "We live in public cloud for mail and messaging. I don't have to worry about security because I don't sync data to the iPhones. It remains in the cloud." He's also said that Clorox is beginning to deploy a small number of iPads; no one has volunteered to replace their notebook computer with an iPad yet, but Loura does believe it can eventually run cloud-based business apps.
Since Clorox apparently didn't give employees an option to stick with BlackBerry, it's unclear how many would have done so given the choice. But according to Loura, "If you believe demographic studies, the workforce in their 20s and 30s isn't going to accept black corporate PCs with black corporate mobile phones and not be allowed to run Facebook or Angry Bird apps." The really interesting part is the huge skew in numbers between people choosing the iPhone versus an Android phone; if all the punditry about Android's ascendency is to be believed, I'd have expected the platform to make a much better showing than 120 out of 2000 employees.
Clorox's story is only one data point, and there might be other factors at work -- maybe the only Android phone Clorox offered its employees was a hunk of junk -- but at least in Clorox's case, Apple's is the only platform that comes out of this looking like it has a viable future.
[via AppleInsider]
